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bodhismile108 · 4 years ago

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This beautiful song warms my heart so sweetly and the video, my goodness... so raw, powerful, in expressing what is in the heart and needs to be heard, witnessed and honored.

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My father came to me in a dream in New York City one day.

I was walking down a busy street at the time, so it was something of an inconvenience; but I hadn’t seen him in years, so I kept calm and carried on. I kept the rhythm of my steps, and I continued to avoid the fast moving obstacles of people and traffic. I began to hum to myself. It’s a thing I do to manage stress, or distress - which is an odd thing to identify upon re-uniting with your own dad, but it was present none the less - we hadn’t seen each other in over 15 years, and this was a waking dream after all.

I hum to myself in the dentist’s chair when they get the drill out. Or anything else that buzzes menacingly, but they told me they don’t mind, and I think they and the assistants are quite amused by it. It beats screams.

Though he did not buzz menacingly, I hummed to my father, there on 2nd Avenue, and he hummed back. He kind of resonated. Words rang out with great eloquence, but the consonants never formed. The words simply vibrated, and I tried to find harmony with them. Sometimes perfect 5ths, sometimes clashing 7ths and 4ths - sometimes in a uniform lockstep beat, in time with my heart or the steady pulse of unrelenting Empire State footsteps - ever forward and constant; other times in challenging cross rhythms and alternate timings that teeter on the brink of chaos, the very edge of loosing all apparent form before suddenly completing their cycle and resolving again into a perfect fractal image.

In this way, we talked.

I couldn’t tell you exactly what he said, and I wouldn’t, it was a private conversation after all - but he left me with a song.

****

Soon after, a close friend, Jack Brown, had just gotten married, and text me a series of tender chords he’d strummed out on his honeymoon (he apologized for his playing in the voice note, explaining that he was unaccustomed to the ring on his finger, and it was making him stumble over the frets. I thought that was just about the most adorable thing I’d ever heard.) He wondered if I could do something unexpected with them.

I kept humming around the streets of New York.

******

A month before the death of George Floyd, I was in London and I reached out to an old colleague, Lanre Malaolu suggesting we finally got round to connecting in the way we’d put off for years and collaborate while I was grounded on a rare trip back in the UK. I had just finished this complicated sort of anthemic lullaby about love, legacy, loss - and how men particularly, deal with such vulnerabilities - with my brother (together we go by the musical pseudonym ‘TUNYA’). Lanre’s recent work exploring tenderness within Black masculinity seemed a perfect, unexpected, and exciting match to explore the themes of the music visually.

By the time of filming in August, the world had been brought to a screaming halt by the rawest, largest, and most powerful display of Black community, pain and activism since the Civil Rights movement of the 60s. A palpable sense of communal grief had dominated every conversation, on a global scale, magnified and brought to boil by the losses and fear of a world brought to its knees by COVID-19. John Lewis had died. Colston was dumped in the sea, and confederate monuments were armed battle grounds - defended by white militias and conquered by Black ballerinas. Chadwick Boseman died. I missed my dad. A world full of uncertainty lacked leadership and compassion, and each new week brought new, unresolvable heartbreak. The core team involved in the film had been privately trying to learn how to be grieving, vulnerable, Black and publicly on display for months, and the piece grew to reflect that. The responsibility as artists to share what light and answers we’d found and contribute that back into a community fractured and isolated by social distance, thrust not only a sense of purpose on the project, but a guiding momentum. It could now only be this.

Joshua Nash is an extraordinarily sensitive performer, and his unique blend of abrasive power and overwhelming vulnerability guides the piece through a physical embodiment of his own personal journey through a universal grief. The battle for control and suppression, the desire to tidy away a past too painful to confront, and the ultimate realisation that the only escape from the trappings of an eternal fight - is to allow oneself to feel it. To accept the pain of past battles, honour it, and through that knowledge, gain the peace necessary to thrive and progress beyond it.

To a world seemingly divided into two camps, both struggling to address a painful history, a cancerous personal and public legacy, I hope the piece’s foreword (unpublished in the end, written late one night between rehearsals, trying to pin down our direction) offers a guiding light toward its redemptive resolution:

“Those who fell before you fought,

For you

Not to be bound in mourning

But to free your life’s celebration”

In the end, like them all, Don’t Wait is simply a love song. It is about finding the path through life’s necessary, good trouble, to life’s intrinsic celebration.

More love, always

Watch the video here

(Photographs by Helen Murray)

————

DON’T WAIT

Sweet, sweet sun

Shine!

I couldn’t wait

Darling

To hold you in these arms

I couldn’t wait

Darling

To keep you

Quite as warm,

Warm as I would have liked

But I’ll soft speak

On the wind

And I

Won’t let you fall apart

If you hold me

Inside

Sweet sweet sun

Please

Shine

The first time I met you

I felt that I could fall into the sun

And still feel the light

Of your eyes

To guide me home

The first time.

The first time I met you

I felt like my life had just begun

Born again,

A better man, a better man

For you

And I’ll be around

On the wind

And I’ll guide you through the night

If you

You call me out

I will hold your hand

I never meant for you to

Stumble

and fall

Without me

Oh, there’s a song in you

All that I never taught

I never thought

I’d have to

I wish I could

More than anything

I want to hear

Oh,

What a song you are

And don’t sing

Like you let me down

You couldn’t

Let me down

And don’t feel

Like you let me down

You could never

Let me down

Don’t ever feel

Like a fool

In those blessed moments

When you fall into the truth

Sweet sweet sun

Of mine

Shine.

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